War and Peace

[altariel]

mraltariel wrote a response to Old Soldiers.

War and Peace

Sometimes, his story could afford a moment's peace and contemplation. Under the shade of a favoured tree, feet in the tingling silver of the winter stream, he would take out the box. Unwatched, he turned the pieces in his fingers, inspecting their dark and sinuous curves, their haughty faces, their minute solidity.

They spoke of his father, and his grandfather out-of-time. They spoke of the rain and the echo of a game that was not a game but history.

That evening, Faramir found an anonymous slip of paper at his bedside, "1.e4" in a childish hand.

He wept.

Comments

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

He plays, doesn't he :)

I love that, beautiful and terse.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

He does! :-)

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Algebraic notation too! I was wondering if the chess moves of Minas Tirith would not be written in curlicue script. But the brevity of "e4" somehow makes it more poignant.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

The nifty think about writing Tolkien-based fic is that you can adopt his conceit of being a translator rather than writer, so this could be read as a translation into our terms of an entirely different notation system.

But it's possible that the Gondorians inherited an algebraic notation system from their forebears, the Numenoreans, who were an industrial power.